Introduction

There are two separate worlds, one including crowded cities and the other full of isolated villages. These two worlds differ in their ways of living and livelihood patterns. Even so, there exists a link between the two. Apart from agricultural development, rural areas demand linkages to local, national and international resources, markets, distribution, services and enterprises. On the other hand, urban development cannot sustain without rural production of food, industrial crops and natural resources.

In between urban and rural areas lies a transition zone, which is known as peri-urban area or urban fringe. Collectively, these areas comprise a region. A region represents the physical, social, economic and cultural characteristics of a given geographical area.

For sustainable rural and urban development, rural-urban linkages need to be created which integrate the social, economic, cultural and environmental issues. Rural-urban linkages involve coordination, collaboration and integration of both horizontal (local government, community and NGOs) and vertical (local government, regional government and the central government) processes for development among sectors. The need of the hour is to transform the vertical planning process into a horizontal one, where local governments and other planning entities work together and explore the possibilities of planning together.

Key Rural-urban Relationships

1. Economic Interdependence: Growth of any city is impossible without supply of food, natural resources and raw materials for industries from the rural areas. On the other hand, rural economic expansion is not possible without urban markets. Thus, there is a need to integrate rural and urban development in policy making and planning rather than treating them as separate autonomous sectors.

Rural and Urban Linkages

In economic terms, there are three types of rural-urban linkages:

• Consumption linkages: Demand for final products
• Production linkages: Backward or forward supply of inputs among business
• Financial linkages: For example, rents extracted by urban landlords, remittances by migrants, rural savings channeled through urban institutions

2. National Economic Resilience: The current trend indicates that economic growth for a few urban areas is taking place while many rural regions are lagging far behind. Due to this discrepancy, there is huge out-migration of rural people to urban areas, resulting in haphazard and unplanned growth of the city. Unplanned growth leads to explosion of population, social unrest and deteriorating environmental conditions. In order to have an overall national development, rural-urban linkages need to be promoted.

3.Environmental Sustainability: Pollutants from rural and urban activities have harmful environmental impact on each other. Industrial waste from urban areas effect the ecological integrity of rural areas and chemical run-off from modern agricultural practices affects the water bodies of urban areas. Thus, there is a need to anticipate environmental impacts on either area.

4. Governance and Citizen Participation: Currently, cities are given higher levels of authority than the rural districts, which creates an imbalance and separation of rural and urban development at local level. Municipal governments are empowered separated from rural areas leading to weak rural political endowment. Decentralisation is the need of the hour. Apart from decentralisation, efforts should also be taken for inclusion of civil society to make the political process more democratic.

5. Poverty Alleviation and Economic Opportunity: There is migration of rural people to urban areas for gaining access to higher economic opportunities. Although it makes a positive contribution to the urban economy, it also contributes to the expansion of slum and squatter settlements.

Issues in Rural-Urban Collaboration

There are various issues in rural-urban collaboration which need to be addressed, such as:

1. Changes in land use including conversion of land (fallow land, agricultural and forest land) to commercial, residential, industrial and so on
2. Natural Resource Management Issues covering forests, water bodies, industrial/vehicular emissions, agriculture (including urban agriculture), land use and livestock
3. Livelihood issues including those driven by urban demand, including brick making, construction, quarries, agro-processing and so on
4. Urban solid and liquid waste management, including sewage, sewage irrigation and landfills
5. Public and private investment and infrastructure development including airports, highways, railways and so on

Decentralisation for Rural-urban Development In India:
Enabling Legislation for Rural-urban Problem Solving

The Indian government made amendments to its constitution in 1992 that laid the legislative basis for addressing some of the most difficult challenges to rural-urban environmental problem solving. Legislative factors often limit the power of different local governments to take the initiative to solve local problems and to collaborate together in order to address mutual problems.

The Indian government has made several changes, which allows local governments to transcend some of the limitations in terms of decision making by specialists using mostly technical criteria, lack of access to finance and the legal leeway to raise their own finance, and political considerations for delineating municipal boundaries:

• Municipalities were made responsible for economic development and social justice in addition to the conventional municipal functions. In place of agency led land use planning, municipal and elected bodies would now be directly involved in matters related to rural and urban planning, diffusing a share of the decision making from specialists into the hands of the people and their elected representatives

• The new constitution requires that municipal areas shall be declared on a greater consideration of other factors, including population, area and percentage of employment in non-agriculture

• The new approach provides that every State should constitute a Governance Board for transitional areas – areas in transition from rural to urban – or the urban fringe in order to manage rural-urban interaction and problems of land use at the fringe

• Local governments can achieve financial self-sufficiency through proportional access to state taxes, grants in aid to municipalities from the Consolidated Fund of the State, locally raised taxes, user charges, non-tax revenue for performance of statuary and regulatory functions, from commercial ventures and borrowings. These mechanisms aim to ensure that local governments have the necessary financial base to address their priorities

The new legal framework allows for a greater balancing of spatial, national, regional, and local priorities, allows more information to flow from the local to regional levels, and allows national rural-urban priorities to be grounded in local reality. Under this system, Municipalities and Panchayats prepare development plans, which are reviewed by District Planning Committees, which consist of locally elected representatives. These Committees consolidate the plans and prepare a Draft Development Plan for the district as a whole. The Draft Development Plan is prepared with respect to matters of common interest such as spatial planning, sharing of water and other physical and natural resources and integrating development of infrastructure and environmental conservation. These plans are then forwarded to the State Government for approval. This potential of flow of information from the people to the policy makers can only become a reality if local governments take the initiative and use the doors that have been opened by these legal reforms.
SOURCE: (UNCHS 1998c)

Current Trends

Governments divide planning into separate rural and urban bureaus. These are largely unconnected sectors. In most developing countries, municipalities have defined administrative rather than decision making responsibilities that are associated with managing hard core-infrastructure provision and energy instead of policy issues such as poverty and economic growth. Policies decided at the centre are handed down to the local government for implementation. The key decisions are already made at the centre, allowing for little flexibility at the local levels. A legal framework was formed that focused on a bottom up approach. Municipalities were given decision-making powers for economic development, thus disseminating power from specialists to municipalities, people and their elected representatives.

Access to greater financial resources was given by ensuring proportional access to various sources of funding so that the local governments have the necessary financial base to address their priorities. Panchayats and municipalities prepare development plans, which then go through several levels of further reviews and are forwarded to the State Government for approval. This system of governance is participatory in nature, which allows for greater flow of information from people to policy makers and ensures robustness in taking policy measures and addressing local conditions.

Conclusion

There is a need to form rural-urban linkages as there exists a large interdependency between the two for both to flourish. Villages and small towns should not be neglected in regional planning process. If this trend persists, then opportunities of development are missed and rural regions fail to retain their population. Policy formulation should be participatory in nature with bottom up approach. q

Deepa Gupta
dgupta@devalt.org

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